You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
PAGE 40: Jeffrey Harris in his Bond Street studio.<br />
Photo: Gerard O’Brien<br />
LEFT PAGE FROM TOP: ‘Joanna’, Jeffrey Harris, 1971,<br />
pencil, watercolour, pastel, 252×197mm. Photo: ODT files<br />
‘Portrait of Jeffrey Harris’, Joanna Paul c. 1971, oil on board,<br />
350×310mm. Photo: ODT files<br />
LEFT: ‘Jeffrey Harris and Joanna Margaret Paul, in Dunedin,<br />
1977’, silver gelatin print. Photo: Marti Friedlander, courtesy<br />
of the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust.<br />
“The couple were soon sharing<br />
a studio in Royal Terrace and<br />
then married in 1971, moving to<br />
a small cottage at Seacliff, where<br />
they spent their time painting<br />
and drawing. It only cost $5 a<br />
week, and didn’t have hot water.”<br />
“I’m looking backwards and going through things. It’s<br />
not really new work, it’s reflecting back. I’m revisiting a lot<br />
of those themes, a summing up of all the work I’ve done.”<br />
He admits to not being a “people person” and enjoying<br />
the solitary life of an artist, although that’s not very good<br />
for relationships or having children.<br />
“I’m addicted to it. I get very fidgety if I can’t paint<br />
or get to the studio, I get twitchy. I find it very calming,<br />
painting. I’m at my happiest painting away and the phone<br />
doesn’t ring. It’s always been like that. It’s my life, painting,<br />
my driving force.”<br />
Until recently he hadn’t really been aware of being<br />
part of a significant time in Dunedin’s art history back in<br />
the 1970s.<br />
“People keep talking about it. I feel lucky in a way to<br />
have been part of it, as there were so many great people<br />
around at that time. It was good to have interacted with<br />
those people. It’s a bit thinner on the ground now. I think<br />
it was isolation then, you were in a pocket, you provided<br />
your own cultural stimulus. You were more supportive in<br />
a way, of each other.”<br />
He hopes Portrait of a Marriage will be the first of<br />
many shows featuring his early work in themed groups.<br />
He has hundreds of works stacked up in his studio to<br />
sort through.<br />
“Time is getting on with me. I walk past a lot of these<br />
works as I pass through the studio, they’re lying there.<br />
You think what’s going to happen to them. Getting older,<br />
you think about these things.”<br />
Portrait of a Marriage runs at Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin, until <strong>April</strong> 18, <strong>2024</strong>.
Change language